ST. EDBURGHA'S CHURCH

Although Pershore Abbey held Yardley for more than two centuries as a direct possession and retained residual rights in it for much longer, it seems to have made no attempt to provide a chapel. Perhaps there was a timber preaching cross somewhere as a meeting-place for occasional priestly visitations during journeys between the Abbey and Maxstoke Priory, but no trace or record of it survives.

The manor was in the Bishopric of Worcester, established in the Hwiccan capital in the late C 7th. But those who wished for regular blessings of the church travelled to Aston four or more difficult miles away. That they did so we may assume, because it was from Aston Church in Lichfield Diocese that a chapelry was established in Yardley.

Presumably the Yardleians built their own small chapel, and priests from Aston officiated therein. Its dedication then or later was to St. Edburgha (Ed-burra), grand-daughter of King Alfred, to whom a chapel in Pershore Abbey had long been dedicated. It is reasonable to suppose that the first timber chapel stood on or near the site of the present church - so why was it built there ? The usual custom was to build a church near the manor house.

Yardley had few resident lords, but the de Limesi family were probably living in a house within Yardley Park moat during the C 13th, when the present church building was begun. The moat may have been in existence when the first chapel was built in 1165 : the Beauchamps of Elmley were then the tenants of the manor, paying for it with 'one knight's fee', and it was perhaps William de Beauchamp who had the moat dug as protection for a house, either for himself or a steward.

Why there ? The site had a poor water supply, being on uncapped clay, but that was probably the reason for its choice : a moat dug in permeable drift has to be lined with puddled clay to make it watertight. Whether there was a nearby rill, a tributary of Yardley brook, to provide drinking water and replenish the moat cannot now be discovered.

Whatever the reason, manor house and church were built on a site with disadvantages, as the few cottagers who settled nearby were to discover. An outer moat, which provided greater protection and more fish, not to mention a larger cess-pool, was infilled so long ago as to be untraceable today. No excavation has been done on the platform, whose last house was untenanted after 1700.